Society also on trial in Michael Dunn case

In a haunting New York Times documentary, Ron Davis, father of Jordan Russell Davis, recalls the day his son donned a hoodie and remarked on his resemblance to Trayvon Martin.

Dad, he said, "That shouldn't have happened to him."

Nearly nine months after an unarmed Trayvon Martin was shot to death in a Feb. 26, 2012, confrontation in a Sanford subdivision, gunfire would forge tragic new parallels between them.

On Nov. 23, Jordan was killed in a Jacksonville gas-station parking lot after a heated quarrel over rap music. Like Trayvon, Jordan was only 17. And like Trayvon, the triggerman, Michael David Dunn, isn't black and claims self-defense — reviving debate over Florida's notorious "stand your ground" law.

Man, do the legal gods possess a perverted sense of humor. Dunn's trial on first-degree murder and attempted-murder charges began last week — the week Trayvon would have turned 19. And the prosecutor, State Attorney Angela Corey, was shellacked during the trial of Trayvon's killer, George Zimmerman.

In opening statements, Assistant State Attorney John Guy argued the case was a simple matter of Dunn going nuclear after Davis, a young black male, mouthed off and his buddies ignored Dunn's demand to turn down their booming music. Incensed, Dunn grabbed his semiautomatic pistol from his glove compartment and fired up to 10 shots at the four friends in the parked Dodge Durango, Guy says. Three rounds struck Jordan.

"Every legal doctrine can be stretched to the point of absurdity, as here," says Norm Pattis, a criminal defense lawyer and author of "Juries & Justice."

I don't know what Dunn saw. But police confirm it wasn't a shotgun. Investigators, according to a CNN.com report, only found a basketball, sneakers, clothing, a camera tripod and some cups on the floor of the bullet-riddled vehicle.

But I'm not here to try the Dunn case.

Because, as with the Zimmerman case, more is on trial here than a 47-year-old man for murder.

The black-white racial dynamic will have to take the stand. Dunn turned up the heat with racially charged jailhouse letters replete with insights such as, "This jail is full of blacks and they all act like thugs. This may sound a bit radical but if more people would arm themselves and kill these [epithet] idiots when they're threatening you, eventually they may take the hint and change their behavior."

As Charles Gallagher, chair of the sociology and criminal justice department at La Salle University, wrote in an email, "This case touches on the hair-trigger finger white America has regarding young black males. As many whites see it, the majority of black men are 'thugs' and a pro-active, offensive position that includes 'shooting first' is justified."

Again, "stand your ground" takes center stage. Yet, whatever the verdict, it won't prove a referendum on the self-defense law for which Florida lawmakers are loath to change "one damn comma," as state Rep. Matt Gaetz so ineloquently put it.

"God didn't make all men equal. Colt did. Colt is a firearm," said defense attorney Cory Strolla, playing to that sentiment. [Dunn] "had every right under the law to not be a victim, to be judged by 12 rather than carried by six."

Still, "stand your ground" is at the heart of the larger question Dunn's trial threatens to, unnervingly, answer: Are we comfortable with the society we're now breeding?

"People are scared of one another, especially if from different races," says Daniel Aaronson, a Fort Lauderdale criminal-defense lawyer. "Having guns and the belief that the 'stand your ground' law empowers the possessor to use them allows that fear and mistrust to end in catastrophic results.

"The law may be bad, but our willingness to tolerate violence in the name of safety and subtly justify the actions based on race is the real problem we face."

A damning summation. Regardless of the outcome of Dunn's trial, we must start deliberating to reach this rational verdict: litigating difference and doubt with gunfire buries wholly American ideals of diversity and E pluribus unum.

Lawyers for the Davis family say the trial should end by Friday. Jordan would have blown out 19 candles on his birthday cake two days later, had a bout of bad manners not proven fatal.